Campaign of The North China Plain Pocket - Outcome

Outcome

Although the communist success appeared to be nothing short of a miracle, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth because the nationalist attempt to eliminate the communist in the North China Plain was doomed to fail from the very beginning due to various blunders Chiang Kai-shek had made, and one of the first was that the failure to realize the political fallout of the militarily sensible action. The nationalists had made a military sensible decision in attacking the enemy in the region when it was the weakest, and successfully broken up the enemy base into three isolated parts. However, the timing was extremely poor because the 240+ assaults on the enemy base came shortly after the truce agreement was reached between the nationalists and the communists, and the full scale civil war had not broken out yet. In contrast, the enemy with absolutely technical and numerical disadvantage, dared not to provoke the nationalists, and instead, wisely chose to give up the communist base and requested to legally withdraw under the nationalist government’s permission. The nationalist regime of course rejected the communist request, since it was on the verge of wiping out the enemy in the region, or at least so they thought, but in doing so, the nationalists had further alienated themselves from the general populace, which was already sympathetic toward the communists in the region due to the nationalist breach of the truce when they attacked the numerically and technically inferior local communists who wisely chose to avoid any provocation of its own. The sentiment was still widely held by the general civilian population, especially in the local regions when the full scale Chinese Civil War had broken out, and the military sensible alternative had put the nationalists in a dilemma because of the political fallout due to the nationalists military actions before the breakout of the full scale civil war.

If the bad timing of the nationalist assaults on the much weaker enemy had alienated the civilian populace, especially in the regions where this campaign was fought, the location the nationalists chose certainly turned the alienations into resentment against the nationalist regime. This communist base in the North China Plain bordering the Henan-Anhui-Hubei-Hunan-Jiangxi provinces was established in the latter stages of World War II, after the communists had successfully driven the Japanese from the countryside. The local population had already blamed nationalilsts for losing the regions to the Japanese invaders, and supported the only Chinese force left in the region, the communists who had successfully establishing bases mostly in the rural regions where better life was provided to the general populace in comparison to that of Japanese occupied regions, and instead of attacking the enemy in regions where at least there were some forms of the nationalists presence during World War II so that there were some legitimacy and popular support, the nationalist assaults on this regions with absolutely no nationalist presence during the war not only caused them the popular support, but also turned the local popular opinion against the nationalists.

Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters were well aware of these two political fallouts but nonetheless took the risk by launching their offensives as planned. The nationalist sympathizers argued that despite the dilemma, Chiang had to proceed due to the immediate military feasibilities, because if the actions were delayed any longer, the situation might turn for the worse (and this was quite possible in reality) for the nationalists and thus making it much for difficult to eradicate the enemy had the nationalists waited, a chance Chiang simply could not afford to take at the time, and this valid argument was even agreed by the enemy they were fighting. Unfortunately for Chiang Kai-shek (and thus fortunately for his communist enemy), the nationalist gamble did not pay off.

The biggest blunder committed by the nationalists, however, was the deployment of troops due to Chiang Kai-shek’s attempt to simultaneously solve the warlord problem that had plagued China for so long and the problem of the extermination of communism together, which proved to be a fatal mistake. In accordance with Chiang’s attempt, a significant portion of the nationalist troops deployed in this campaign were those belonged to warlords from Guangxi and Hunan. This created two serious consequences that caused the nationalist the possible victory, and the first had to do with the earlier history of the warlord era in China.

During the warlord era before World War II, the region was ravaged by the continuous fighting among the warlords of various provinces, and warlords from Guangxi and Hunan caused most damages, and was thus mostly hated by the local populace. Of course, none of the warlords had ever specifically targeted the local regions for destruction, but due to the strategic location of the area, it was destined to become the battlefield whenever the warlords were embroiled in fights for more turfs. Instead of deploying his own troops which would certainly rally more support for the nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek deployed the troops belonged to the most hated warlord cliques by the local population, Guangxi and Hunan, and allowed these warlords to dominate the region after the campaign. As a result, when the two previous nationalist blunders on the time of the offensive and the location of the offensive had turned the local populace from alienation to resentment, this third blunder had certainly turned the local population against the nationalists by driven their support firmly to the enemy side, and not only this contributed to the nationalist failure of this campaign, but it also paved the way for another nationalist defeat in the Campaign of Marching into the Dabie Mountains when enemy returned to the region a year later.

The deployment of the warlords’ troops also serious hindered the nationalist attempt to eradicate the enemy in that the warlords’ objectives were completely different than that of Chiang Kai-shek. In contrast to Chiang Kai-shek’s objective of exterminating the enemy within the region, the warlords’ objective was purely eradication instead of extermination. Due to the worry (with justification) of Chiang Kai-shek’s attempt to simultaneously solve the warlord problem that had plagued China for so long and the problem of the extermination of communism together, the warlords were well aware that their own forces will be significantly reduced if they were really to fight the enemy and once the enemy were exterminated as Chiang Kai-shek had hoped, their forces would be sent elsewhere in China to fight the communists. Consequently, their power and turfs would significantly reduced or even lost completely as the military strength was diminished. On the other hand, if the enemy were allowed to escape unharmed, they would create problem for Chiang Kai-shek in other part of the China and thus Chiang would not have the resource to confront the warlords. Furthermore, as the enemy was allowed to escape unscratched in the region, Chiang Kai-shek’s own troops would be forced to bear the brunt of the fighting while the warlords would consolide the power in the newly gained territories. As a result, just like in the Long March, the warlords’ had never put any real effort to fight the enemy and the majority of the nationalist casualties in this campaign were among Chiang Kai-shek’s own troops.

Again, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers were well aware the drawbacks of deploying warlords’ troops but went on with the plan anyway, but Chiang Kai-shek did it for a reason, and in fact, a rather very good reason. As Chiang’s sympathizers had accurately pointed out (and again agreed by Chiang’s communist adversaries), it was already extremely difficult to convince the warlords to deploy their troops outside their own turfs into this region, and any further attempts to deploy their forces further away to exchange for Chiang’s own troops being sent to this region would be impossible. As demonstrated later during the Chinese Civil War, the warlords would often simply refuse to take the commands or send their own troops during the campaigns and battles just to keep their own strength.

The last blunder nationalist made was the infatuation with holding on to as much land as possible, which resulted in insufficient force to complete the planned mission. Although more than 300,000 nationalist troops were mobilized in this campaign, around two third of them was deployed to guard the newly conquered land. As the enemy left more than half of its original strength in the region to fight the guerrilla warfare, these troops were tied down, because it was difficult to exterminate the elusive enemy and safeguard the territory at the same time when a static defense posture was adopted in order to hold on to the land. In the meaning time, the remaining mobile strike force was insufficient to exterminate the main force of the enemy attempting to breakout, thus neither the extermination of the enemy nor the long-term safeguard of the newly conquered territory could be effectively achieved. Although the nationalist failed to eliminate the enemy, they did succeeded in eradicating the enemy and temporarily taking the enemy base in the region, though this success was negated by the political fallouts such as failing to achieve its original objective of exterminating the enemy within the region in this first campaign of the full scale Chinese Civil War after World War II.

The communists, in contrast, did not have the dilemmas of the nationalists and benefited greatly from the nationalist blunders, and thus successfully escaped the nationalist encirclement. In carrying out their plans for the breakout, the communists successfully escaped in the directions where the nationalists totally unexpected and thus achieving surprise, and once the nationalists had realized what was happening, it was too late to redeploy their troops to make up for their misjudgements. Proportionally, the communist had suffered much greater loss because although the number of casualties are the same of both sides, the nationalists had five times more troops than the communists. However, this setback for the communists was minor in comparison to the strategic success of the breakout, and along with the Dingtao Campaign and the Central Jiangsu Campaign, this campaign was one of these three critical ones that helped to stabilize the southern front for the communists in the initial stage of the Chinese Civil War.